The car had settled at an angle on its side. It looked to be almost up and running. From our keen vantage we could see all of them. Railer and I were no better than the cockeyed Reston boys.

I saw the baby clearly first because the baby was pressing at the passenger window. The baby was straining out of her mother’s arms. The baby had pinned her pink mouth to the window like she was playing with us, like she was kissing us through five feet of ice. I brushed the snow away with the ball of my boot and looked down to see the mother, the young boys struggling in the backseat like they were still at play. One boy was looking upward, a painted statue, his hair rising from his head like thorns. The father had his right arm resting on the wheel, looking forward, as if he were still driving the highway. But I kept locking my eyes on the woman. She wasn’t just pretty. Beneath the silver strands of ice that held her she was beautiful. Her blond hair had swirled up around her face in a halo of bubbles, caught just before the water had frozen. She was turned almost toward us, turning toward her baby, and she was smiling. She had dimples. She was smiling, I could tell. And there was something about that smile that even then reminded me of Louise. I told myself they were dead, had been dead for weeks, but I could still see the moment of their deaths. I couldn’t take my eyes off the sight of all of them, stiff and unchanging, beneath hard water. I blew warm air into my hands although the deep-freeze cold had ended. The cold spell was broken, I told myself. Even as we stood on solid ice, the middle of the river was claiming a wider channel, broader than the length of that young mother’s arms. I wondered if the car would break through its casing in February if we left it and travel on with its strange and happy family. “How can this be?” I asked myself because Railer had gone back to his car. Railer and I both had listed that accident as a river drowning. We had no other way to explain it, and I wonder now and then if that story happened the way I remember it. I’d never mentioned that accident to Railer again. But one time I did ask my supervisor, in a roundabout way, how something like that could have happened. His look told me I needed a day off. He told me “something like that” wasn’t possible. I wondered what was possible and what was not. I looked in the backseat at Louise but she had slumped into the seat and had turned her face from me.